Australian Politics
Australia is already at Net Zero
Prof. Ian Plimer
Australia has a landmass of 7,692,024 square kilometres with a sparse inland population, greenhouse gas-emitting livestock, and heavy industry.
Combined with the transport of livestock, food, and mined products over long distances to cities and ports and the export of ores, coal, metals, and food for 80 million people, there is a high per capita emission of carbon dioxide. If for some perverse perceived moral reason we reduce our emissions of plant food, then we let millions in Asia starve. Our food exports contribute to increasing the standard of living, longevity, and health of billions of people in Asia.
The forestry, mining, and smelting industries have been under constant attack by green activists who are happy to put hundreds of thousands out of work and destroy the economy. They train their sights on the cheapest and most reliable form of electricity and want to replace it with unreliable subsidised wind and solar power simply because the burning of fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide which they fraudulently deem is a dangerous pollutant. The next target will be food-producing farmers. They, like the forestry and mining industries, have nowhere to go if destroyed by green activists. Australia cannot import food if there is no export revenue generated to pay for imports.
With inflation and debt on the rise, Australia has far greater economic priorities than to shift the whole economy into uncharted waters, increase energy costs, destroy a successful efficient primary industry, decrease employment, and decrease international competitiveness because its emission of the plant food carbon dioxide is deemed sinful. It is a very long bow to argue that Australia’s emission of one molecule of plant food in 6.6 million other atmospheric molecules has any measurable effect whatsoever on global climate.
Ice core shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide rises follow natural temperature rises and, in past times when atmospheric carbon dioxide was up to 100 times higher than now, there were ice ages and no runaway global warmings. Furthermore, it has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. Why even bother about the minuscule Australian carbon dioxide emissions when the big emitters don’t?
Annual Australian per capita carbon dioxide emissions are in the order of 20 tonnes per person. There are 30 hectares of forest and 74 hectares of grassland for every Australian and each hectare annually sequesters about one tonne of carbon dioxide by photosynthesis. Australia has 4 per cent of the world’s global forest estate, the world’s sixth largest forested area, and the fourth largest area of forest in nature conservation reserves. On the continental landmass, grasslands and forests remove by natural sequestration more than three times the amount of Australia’s domestic and industrial carbon dioxide emissions. The expansion of woody weeds, crops, reduction in regular burning, and vegetation clearing restrictions further increases natural sequestration.
Australian forests adsorb 940 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum compared to our domestic and industrial emissions of 417 million tonnes. Add to that the absorption of carbon dioxide in continental Australia to the carbon dioxide adsorption of 2,500,000 square kilometres of continental shelf waters and Australia sequesters some five times as much carbon dioxide as it emits. Australia does more than its share of the heavy lifting for global sequestration of carbon dioxide.
Australia’s net contribution to global atmospheric carbon dioxide is negative. We are already at Net Zero. This is validated by the net carbon dioxide flux estimates from the IBUKI satellite carbon dioxide data set.
None of these calculations involve the fixing of biological carbon compounds and atmospheric carbon dioxide into soils. Soils contain two or three times as much carbon dioxide as the atmosphere, soil carbon increases fertility and water retention and reduces farming costs. Natural sequestration in Australia locks away carbon dioxide and to lock it away carbon dioxide by industrial sequestration in deep drill holes is a foolish fashionable way of wasting large amounts of taxpayer’s money.
Using the thinking of the IPCC, UN, and activist green groups, Australia should be very generously financially rewarded with money from poor, populous, desert, and landlocked countries for removing its own emissions from the atmosphere and the carbon dioxide emissions from many other nations. By this method, wealthy Australia can take money from poor countries.
Net Zero has nothing to the environment and climate change and is all about power and the transfer of hard-earned wealth.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/australia-is-already-at-net-zero
**********************************************Now steak and sausages are off the menu! Australians told to give up MEAT as part of woke academics' plan to save the world from climate change
This is an old song. It is never likely to get large-scale support
Australians will need to give up their weekly steaks and turn 'flexitarian' to meet climate change targets and hit net zero by 2050, according to academics.
Aussie meat-eaters are blamed for accelerating the crisis in a new book by Sydney University's Dr Diana Bogueva and Professor Dora Marinova of Curtin University.
They say one calorie of beef takes a staggering 38 calories to create, causing one-third of all greenhouse gases and wiping out wildlife through land clearing.
The claims have been dismissed by the cattle farmers as out-dated nonsense.
But the academics insist the meat industry needs to be overhauled if the world is to survive - and current farming methods are unsustainable.
'Rather than growing the grain or the food we need for human consumption we are growing the grain for the animals - and then eating them.' Prof Marinvoa told the ABC.
''That's a very inefficient and irrational way of feeding the population.'
She said Aussies were 'addicted to meat', but needed to slash their intake by 80-90 per cent and turn flexitarian by becoming mainly vegetarian with occasional meat.
The academics' book 'Food in a Planetary Emergency' says Aussies need to switch to a diet based on vegetables, legumes, grains, nuts and fruits.
Prof Marinova admits older Aussies may find it hard to make the transition but she said the younger Gen Z population - born after 1995 - are more open to the idea.
But even they draw the line at switching to even more environmentally-conscious insect protein burgers and meat substitutes.
'They are quite keen to increase their consumption of traditional plant-based food such as fruit and vegetables, legumes, tubers,' she said.
'But they are more hesitant to go to alternative proteins despite this industry essentially booming.'
However the wider population has yet to get the message.
The book's authors carried out an earlier study which found meat consumption has gone up dramatically this century
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Coles: Caring for some but not for others
Coles sacked the last of its unvaccinated staff at the beginning of this year, long after state mandates fell and other industries began allowing the so-called mavericks of the workforce back into the office. The move, along with other supermarket giants, saw thousands of Australians unceremoniously dumped, many of them single mothers or from struggling households.
‘Shop safe at Coles’ is something that looks good printed in big letters across double-page ads to those still suffering from anxiety hangovers. Just don’t ask too many questions about the health logic, given unvaccinated people can shop in the store, but not stand behind the counter.
Speaking of corporate virtue signalling.
The same company turned around this week and announced it would be offering its trans and gender-diverse employees ten extra days of paid leave for the purpose of ‘gender affirmation’. ‘Affirmation’ is a hazy term that Coles describes as ‘any process’ that relates to the act of gender affirmation including surgical, social, legal, or medical action. Leave could be granted for anything from an appointment with a lawyer through to full surgery.
Gender Affirmation Leave was timed to coincide with the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexism, and Transphobia – one of the dozens of days and months dedicated to a sexual preference or pronouns.
Coles Chief Legal and Safety Officer, David Brewster, (who also serves as the Chair of the Pride Steering Committee), released a statement.
‘We know that we have at least 900 team members who identify as transgender or gender diverse. We need to have proper policy and education in this area so there is clear guidance around taking leave for this important transition in their life.’
Coles attached a long and bizarre ‘gender affirming’ statement that seems a little over the top for employment that largely involves stacking shelves and pushing trolleys. Its headings include ‘encouraging you to be your authentic self’ and ‘developing our Pride Team member network’ – which doesn’t sound like something employers should concern themselves with.
This move, described as ‘way ahead of politicians’ (add to that logic, reason, and fairness) is meant to be an action against ‘trans hate’. 2022 has transitioned into a world where an employer who is not constantly, publicly, and (preferably financially) ‘affirming’ an employee they must, by default, hate them. For most of human history, workers preferred their employers to keep their noses out of any private medical business.
‘You’ll be supported as the gender with which you identify, wear the clothes or uniform of your affirmed gender, use the toilets and change rooms of your affirmed gender and be referred to by the name of your affirmed gender too,’ read a statement, issued by Coles.
The statement leans heavily toward sentiments of anti-discrimination and equity – which is fine, one is simply left to wonder where this emotionally sensitive Coles hurt-feelings committee was when it was ruthlessly sacking unvaccinated staff who simply wanted to keep their jobs and their body autonomy at the same time. Coles went one step further, attempting to impose its vaccination policies on unrelated suppliers, contractors, partners, and anyone working onsite.
And no. If you’re an employee with a non-gender related medical or emotional issue, you’ll have to plan ahead and sacrifice some of your holiday leave when you run out of the standard state-sanctioned medical allotment. No one is going to give you a Woke Virtue point for a hip replacement.
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Tony Abbott warns Liberals against giving into political correctness amid election loss
Former prime minister Tony Abbott has warned the Liberals against panicking in the wake of its devastating election loss, saying the party should not give into political correctness.
In an opinion column published in The Daily Telegraph, Mr Abbott said the Coalition didn’t deserve to be bundled out of office, based on its record, and former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who had navigated the country so well through the pandemic, should never have lost his seat.
“Defeat always prompts anxieties that our party might somehow be out-of-step with popular feeling on climate change, for instance, or on identity issues,” Mr Abbott wrote.
“And in the seats we lost on the weekend, perhaps we were.
“Yet between the Coalition and the ALP, this wasn’t actually a climate change election. Those that were – in 2010, 2013 and 2019 – had a very different outcome.
“The question is: do we win so-called teal seats back by trying to be even more zealous on climate or by finding other issues on which to appeal?”
Mr Abbott, who supported controversial Liberal candidate Katherine Deves during the campaign in his old seat of Warringah, which he lost to Independent Zali Steggall in 2019, said the loss of once blue-ribbon Liberal seats was just a “dramatic illustration of the long-term trend of better-off people to vote left”.
But also noted the declining margins for Labor in “struggle street”.
“Before leaping to the conclusion that the Libs should move further left, it’s also worth noting that the National Party held all its seats and that the Coalition did best in Queensland and Tasmania, where the state party has tended to be least ‘woke’,” he wrote.
“My instinct is that the teal seats will return to the Liberal fold when a Labor government is seriously mismanaging the economy, not when the Liberal Party goes green.”
Mr Abbott said the focus should be on the new Albanese government, which will inevitably make plenty of mistakes.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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